A tale of freedom from Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier, of Girl with a Pearl Earring fame, shifts her focus from Europe and enigmatic works of art to 1850s Ohio and the Underground Railroad in her latest, The Last Runaway. Jilted by her fiancé, quiet Quaker Honor Bright departs safe England for untamed America, and learns there that living according to one’s principles is easier said than done.Left suddenly alone on her new...

Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

SOUTHERN COMFORTBeth Hoffman’s delightful debut novel, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, is a sweet Southern tale with an unforgettable heroine at its center. Set in 1967, the book skillfully depicts the social dynamics of a South that’s still coming of age. After her high-strung mother—a former beauty queen named Camille—is killed by an ice cream truck, 12-year-old CeeCee...

Rediscovering the past

Girl with a Pearl Earring made Tracy Chevalier a household name in the historical fiction world. And now, with the dazzling Remarkable Creatures, Chevalier gives us another intriguing celebration of women and friendship.Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster, has just moved to Lyme Regis, a town on the southern coast of England, with her sisters. She falls in love with scouring the beaches...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

Exquisite, enigmatic, the tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn in the MusÅe de Cluny in Paris enthrall viewers. Now, Tracy Chevalier does for them what she did so brilliantly for a Vermeer painting in Girl with a Pearl Earring; she conjures up a wholly believable story of the creation of a masterpiece and the people involved. The Lady and the Unicorn, set in Paris and Brussels at the end of...

Weaving fiction and history

In her vividly evocative fourth novel, The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracy Chevalier returns to the appealing blend of fiction and art history that she wove together so successfully in her luminous bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, recently adapted into a feature film. Just as that book so plausibly re-imagined the story behind the eponymous Vermeer painting, Chevalier's latest does the same...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

Berlin, 1945, battered, bombed-out, divided, is the stark setting and frame for Joseph Kanon's brilliantly nuanced historical thriller The Good German. Journalist Jake Geismar returns to Germany to cover the end of the war and search for the woman he loved. While he tries to put back the pieces of the life and love he knew before, Jake becomes involved in solving the murder of an American GI....

Another journey into the past with 'Pearl' author Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier feels lucky. Not because her novel Girl With a Pearl Earring has sold one million copies and is still making the bestseller lists. Not because she has just released her new novel Falling Angels. She feels lucky because she lives in the modern era. "I'm incredibly thankful to be born when I was," says the author....

Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

With a quarter-million reading groups currently active, it seems that more people than ever before are thinking and talking about books. Because one of the biggest challenges faced by a book club is deciding what to read, BookPage is happy to launch a monthly column spotlighting new paperback titles we feel would make great reading group selections. This new column will also list resources for...